Little to Celebrate on Obama’s First Anniversary? You Kidding?

posted at 12:24 pm on November 4, 2009 by Howard Portnoy
[ Elections ]    printer-friendly

Simon Heffer has an item in this morning’s Telegraph titled “It’s Barack Obama’s first anniversary — but there’s precious little to celebrate.” To which I say, “Really?” To me, there is much to celebrate. There is the enduring greatness of America as a nation.

What last night’s elections demonstrate is precisely the platform most Americans, and certainly the vast majority of those who voted for him, thought he was running on: hope and change.

Look at where we are and were as a country. For many reasons, some valid, some not, the American electorate hailed the departure of George W. Bush with the same alacrity as Nancy Pelosi, who famously (and rudely) said, “It’s like a great weight has been lifted.” (That, by the way, would be perfect for her epitaph.) The country was exhausted. We had been through the worst attack on American soil in the history of the nation. This was followed by two contentious wars, a financial collapse of unprecedented proportions, and — toward the end of the Bush years — TARP.  I believe an appealing sandwich could have won election if it had promised to sate the American public’s hunger for something different.

Instead, along came an inexperienced, young, and (to some) attractive politician — who also happened to be black. This event was viewed by starry-eyed children of voting age as a once-in-a-lifetime chance; the same kind of opportunity Americans must have felt when John Kennedy was on the Democrat ticket. Blacks saw this, wrongly, as a chance finally for redemption, and they turned out at the polls in historic numbers.

Saying that conservatives were uneasy is an understatement. Although the press refused for the first time in history to do its job and vet a candidate for the highest office in the land, the conservative blogosphere promptly filled in many of the gaps. Here was a man who had cut his teeth in the wasteland that is Chicago politics. His inspiration came from an America-hating preacher whose black nationalist church Obama sat in uncritically for 20 years. By his own admission, Obama spent his formative years hanging out with Marxists.

In spite of the warnings from the right, the man was elected by the left and parts of the center. Obama’s victory was seen as a mandate.

But to do what? Most Americans who supported him assumed he would fix the broken economy (as he promised) and bring the light of day to Washington dealings (as he also promised). Obama saw (or pretended to see) his mandate as radically transforming a capitalist republic into a social democracy. And he set out to do that with a passion.

Within days of moving into the White House, he had passed a flabby, bloated, pork-laden sitmulus bill that cost nearly $800 billion. Then he went to work on health care reform (read: nationalizing one fifth of the economy) and a green energy initiative (read: crippling once and for all industry as we know it, while placing an enormous tax burden on the American people); another would-be broken promise.

In the meantime, he surrounded himself with the most radical people imaginable, starting with his lifelong friend Valerie Jarrett. Then again, considering his background, who would one assume he would select as his advisers.

As time went on, it became clear to more and more of the electorate that Obama was in way over his head. He seemed helpless to get his health care and energy legislation through Congress. He became nasty and accusatory toward those who disagreed with him. He appeared hamstrung to fulfill his promise to close Guantanamo and found himself supposedly supporting a war that his base opposed. His poll numbers declined.

Which brings us to last night. The American people who voted in Virginia and New Jersey sent a clear message, not just to Obama but to the rest of America. They voted for what they thought they were getting in voting for Obama. And that is precisely what they got, for the first time in a year: the promises of hope and change.

Cross-Posted at Zombie Contentions

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